Re:Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts
by sunshinelackof on Monday April 08, 2019 @01:20PM
(#19607141)
Corporations insulate individual actors from the market in return for a corporate wage. The baker enters the market to pursue his own interests, but when USA Bread Corp. hires thousands of bakers, those bakers are no longer perusing their own interests but instead the interests of the shareholders of USA Bread Corp.
With this perspective it's reasonable to expect that a corporation that has every available advantage over the independent worker should serve and improve some common good.
Re:Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts
by SkyBelow on Monday April 08, 2019 @02:29PM
(#19607811)
And when bakers hire an assistants, those assistants are no longer perusing their own interest but instead the interest of the bakers.
The scale is different, but generally scale alone does not change the ethical or moral designation of an action.
Re:Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts
by sunshinelackof on Monday April 08, 2019 @03:09PM
(#19608133)
Even so the relation isn't simply a matter of scale. Corporations can do a lot things that people cannot. Notably, corporations can live for hundreds of years, some maybe forever. Simply put it would be nearly impossible for a baker to compete directly with a corporation in the same market. By contrast the baker's assistant could directly compete with the baker given the time and resources.
Re:Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts
by stickfigure on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @10:14AM
(#19614851)
This is patent nonsense. At least here in the US, bakeries are overwhelmingly small single retail shops. Independent coffee shops are thriving despite Starbucks. Small businesses with <100 employees employ 35% of Americans.
Corporations have diseconomies of scale too. If they didn't ycombinator wouldn't exist.
Re:Why Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Congress's Efforts
by ABCLAW on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @04:14PM
(#19618499)
>At least here in the US, bakeries are overwhelmingly small single retail shops.
How did you come to that conclusion? My reading of the market data shows the opposite.
https://www.bakeryandsnacks.com/Article/2018/10/31/Industry-...
Maybe you think retail shops that finish off parbaked goods are actually mom-and-pop shops?
Eh? Not since Adam Smith, at least:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.
Really, he took a quite a dim view of the moral character of businessmen:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices
...and:
To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.